Abstract Educational experts believe that effective teaching methods such as concept mapping are appropriate to help nursing students develop critical thinking skills. Hence, this study was carried out to review the effectiveness of concept mapping in developing critical thinking skills among nursing students in Iran and the world. A systematic review was conducted on thirteen research papers, review articles, and meta-analyzes published from 1998 to 2015 and assessed the effect of concept mapping method on nursing students' critical thinking. Farsi and English articles with full text available at Data bases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Science Direct and Ovid were searched using keywords concept mapping, critical thinking skills, nursing student, and nursing education in the title or abstract of papers. Overall, eleven quasi-experimental studies and two experimental studies were reviewed. Most papers based on critical thinking questionnaires of California used to measure critical thinking. Most studies reported that concept mapping have been effective to promote critical thinking skills of nursing students. Our results showed that studies conducted on concept mapping are still in its infancy. Therefore, the positive impact of concept mapping method on nursing students' critical thinking skills is still an open question and requires further experimental and longitudinal studies with larger sample sizes and rigorous methodologies